Human Performance at Play

What role does human performance play in our lives? How does it impact us? Have we really seen the full capacity of human performance? Do we have the capability to increase our human performance?

Human performance can play a significant role at work, at home, in school, and in our social lives. As I was thinking about this term, I thought of the brain and its function as an essential part of human performance. It didn't take long for my memory to recall a movie I watched eight years ago. In the movie Lucy (2014), Morgan Freeman plays the role of discovering Scarlett Johansson's increasing brain capacity which reaches 100%.

Watch Lucy (Trailer)

What if our brain capacity did increase?

Based on this movie's perspective, the increased brain capacity increased human performance. But, is this the reality of how we see the human performance in the workplace, or at home? Not really. Most people do not know their brain capacity.

According to Stolovitch (2004), "performance is a function of both the behavior and accomplishment of a person or group of people. Performance includes the actions of a person or people and the result of the action or actions" (pg. 8).

So, why does human performance matter to me and my professional role? The work I do day-to-day impacts human performance directly. Organizations have goals. Those goals have strategies. Those strategies need tactics. Those tactics need the strategic capabilities of people. The strategic capabilities of people need learning and development to build those skills for those capabilities. And, finally, those skills and capabilities need defined behaviors. This is where I come in!

I build strategic learning for the behaviors we need, which leads to building skills, and those skills build a capability. The skills framework is the foundation I use to support the build of strategic capabilities in people which enable the success of our organizational strategy. That's a lot, I know. This concept of skills-based learning and building capabilities is new for all of us. With the rapidly changing world, the workforce is needing new skills to catch up with the pace of change. As learning professionals, we need to develop learning quicker and faster!

A week ago, I began a new course specifically on the topic of Human Performance. Given this topic is embedded directly in my day-to-day work, I was curious to read the syllabus goals to really understand what I would expect from this learning experience. This is what interested me the most from the syllabus,

"...human performance, the theoretical underpinnings of the field, research and application literature, and various approaches to solving human performance problems."

Solving the world's problems? I love it. Solutions and action planning is a strong abilities of mine. Not to forget to mention my curiosity leads me to uncover issues, problems, barriers, misalignments, gaps, and all synonyms of these words.

For me, it will be valuable to gain a deeper understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of the field. I'm currently exploring and learning more about the High-Performance Learning Journey, a methodology to design learning to increase performance and capabilities for organizations. If I can make correlations between the theoretical aspects of human performance with the proven experiences I've had directly, it will lead to a greater impact on my abilities to design high-impact learning experiences.